1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to compressing data and more particularly relates to producing contiguous compressed data.
2. Description of the Related Art
A data processing device such as a server, computer, personal digital assistant, router, telephone, cellular telephone, and network often compresses data into compressed data. The compressed data has a reduced footprint in memory and in a storage device, and can be transmitted with less bandwidth. The data processing device typically compresses data by dividing the data into one or more data blocks and compressing each data block with a compression algorithm such as the adaptive lossless data compression (“ALDC”) algorithm.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating data compression 100 in accordance with the current practice. As depicted, data 120 is divided into one or more data blocks 105. The data processing device (not shown) allocates one or more receiving spaces 110 in a receiving medium such as a memory module or a storage device for each data block 105 and compresses each data block 105 into a compressed data block 115. Each allocated receiving space 110 receives the corresponding compressed data block 115. The receiving space 110 is often larger than the data block 105, as applying a compression algorithm to some data blocks 105c may create a compressed data block 115c larger than the original data block 105c. 
Since each receiving space 110 must be larger than each data block 105, the receiving spaces 110 for all compressed data blocks 115 often exceeds the size of the data 120. In addition, the compressed data blocks 115 are discontiguous within the receiving spaces 110. The data processing device must further consolidate the discontiguous compressed data blocks 115 and free the excess receiving space to achieve a reduced data footprint.
What is needed is a process, apparatus, and system that compresses data into contiguous compressed data. Beneficially, such a process, apparatus, and system would reduce the bandwidth of the receiving medium that receives the compressed data.